The last three days have been the craziest, most humbling and mind-blowing days of my life.

As I alluded to in the previous photo, I was looking for a new job — because I was about to get fired. Or ‘let go’ — whatever. My blog, Download Squad, had its entire staff let go. Three days ago, April 11, we received an email from our owner — AOL — saying that our services were no longer required. A few minutes later, our access to the site was removed. No ceremony, no velvet glove — just flat out firing. Boom!

Anyway, the news leaked out to Twitter on the night of the 11th. There was some plaintive cries of mourning, but nothing too exciting. I went to bed, sad at the loss of Download Squad, but little did I know what would happen over night…

I woke up to a great story about Download Squad on ZDNet (though it’s a bit too much of a Seb homage), and a nice one on Mashable (the facts are a bit wonky, but the comments are lovely). After that… well, the cat was out of the bag, I guess.

I should preface this by saying I had an inkling that things would be good after Download Squad — I had the suspicion that finding a new job would be easy. As it turned out, both of those ideas were MASSIVE understatements. I can’t put into words how immensely blown away I was by the job offers that started to pour in. By the end of day 1, I’d received about 300 email — letters of condolence, PR girls touching base, and so on — and about 5 job offers. No big offers, though — nothing from my top choices.

At this point, I was a little nervous. I now knew there was money on the table, but I wasn’t really looking for money — I was simply looking for the right job. I went to bed. Didn’t sleep much, though. I was still a bundle of nerves and adrenaline. I read a lot of Fall of Hyperion that night.

At the start of day 2, the big job offers started to roll in. One from my (at the top) top choice. It was more money than I’d expected, too. I was about to sign up, too, until a friend told me to wait just a bit longer. As it turns out, that was probably the best advice I’ve received in years — maybe ever. By the middle of day 2, I had received an offer to play the Lead Editor of a Ziff Davis property. The money was great, and the scope of the job was exactly what I was looking for.

Then, if I thought things couldn’t get any crazier, I received an offer from a really big site — one of the biggest tech sites on the Web. They offered me my own blog! With a huge audience! Insane, really — and right up my alley. I like soapboxing, if you didn’t know.

Anyway… to cut a long story short, the offers kept coming when I awoke this morning, day 3, 72 hours after being fired. I weighed myself this morning and I’d lost about 5lbs; more than 2kg.

I was just about to sign the Ziff Davis contract when I received two more job offers — really, within about 5 minutes of each other — from sites that are… well, I wish I could name them, but I don’t think that would be very polite. They’re both huge, like… top-100-in-the-United-States… BIG. Big like two Pavarottis. The money wasn’t quite right, though, and the scope of the jobs couldn’t compare to the Ziff Davis role.

I signed the Ziff Davis contract. I start on Monday! I’m staying in the UK, but Ziff Davis is headquartered in New York, with an office in San Francisco. There’s a desk for me at either office, if I need it… or want it.

The other writers — my writers — look like they will all land on their feet, too. It looks like there will be a happy ending after all. That’s my tale. I hope I don’t have to live through another three days like this for a long, long time.

RIP Download Squad
2005 – 2011

[I wrote this at the end of a very, very long day, with very little sleep under my belt. Apologies if it doesn't make much sense in places. I guess that adds to the whole 'realness' of it, though!]

Hello, friends! Sorry about the slow reply. Things have still been pretty hectic since I signed on to the new job — and to be honest, I’ve been enjoying a few days of NOT WRITING. It’s very refreshing.

Alexa — I liked horizontal too! But… everyone turns their head to look at a horizontal photo anyway. I hate having to turn _my_ head, so I figured I’d just rotate the damn image.

Moriarty — I intend to do plenty of Apple bashing, don’t worry. The world is in desperate need of some frickin’ sanity when it comes to Apple-related news. At my new gig, you can expect to see stories that look like “Apple announces new A6 CPU — here’s why it sucks.”

Arina… ah, Arina, I always stare at your little avatar photo…

I’m a blogger/editor. Used to be a coder/developer/designer (through the Dot Com Boom, and up until a few years ago). Decided to give it all up and start writing instead (which is when this blog came into existence!)

Then factor in that I also like shorter girls, and your avatar makes you look tiny…

Anyway! Control yourself, Sebastian…

I don’t have any beef with Apple products particularly — they’re mostly good — but I have a problem with Apple zealotry. Put simply, Apple products are not THAT much better than the competition. The amount of news that Apple gets, compared to its actual market/usage share, is retarded.

My main beef goes something like this; a mouse with one button as standard – why?

If a poor workman blames his tools then why are so many dim-witted tech types praising their Macs?

Microsoft flourished in it’s early days by removing boundaries between systems and making everything compatible, it is in it’s current death throws it’s because it’s trying to employ closed systems in a world where open standards are expected (.docx being a huge indicator of one of many poor choices which affected businesses who ‘upgraded’ at the get go).

Apple has never been open. It’s slowly went from being completely closed to taxing developers for using their systems which are now based on third party hardware using patents owned by Apple – it’s a fools game all round. Add to this that only people with too much cash and not enough insight into what information and communication technology is about buy and revere their wares with no apparent regard for the repercussions for the industry overall and you have exactly the reason why I don’t like Apple, their products or their customers.

Information wants to be free and it will be.

Anyway I know you can’t agree with this outlook on any official level, I just wanted to share with you the reasons from this one guy’s dislike of Apple (That and they are scared of a BASIC C64 emulator app on their iPhones which is very funny in my mind).

Enjoy your first day on the new job and let us know where to look for it.

Great to hear that you landed another job. I will greatly miss the Download Squad it was one of the few sites i had to review daily because most other sites just pulled from yours to repost info. Sucks AOL did that to you guys at least been more professional about it. But I think we all already knew AOL sucks. So whatever you do i hope you make AOL regret closing you down and i for one will not be viewing any AOL bullcrap sites like techcrunch which i had actually given up on a long time ago…

It might be 10 days later, but I’ve returned to reply to your comments. Thanks, Sophia, Dostadawg!

Actually, instead of writing more here, I’m going to write another blog post instead — but just for the record, my new site is ExtremeTech. Don’t worry too much about the old-school design: it’s being relaunched next month

Geez just catching up with you again!!! You are awesome!! I have never been in that position where job offers just keep rolling in! Good luck in your new venture. SF eh? I’d love to move there eventually myself..